


i think we're haunted (i can hear the echoes of the past)

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Found Footage Horror Movie, Comedy, Haunted Houses, Horror, M/M, Multimedia, ghost story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2020-12-16 11:30:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21035549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: Lee moves into a new house. Well, not quite so new - but newto him. Unfortunately, it seems someone else might already be living there.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally supposed to be for the 2019 GaaLee Fest, but I didn't get it done in time! It was meant to be for Day 6 - the prompt was "Fantasy/Fairy Tale AU".
> 
> Title is from [Haunted by Maya Kern](https://mayakern.bandcamp.com/track/haunted).
> 
> This is my first time attempting a multimedia work. It does rely on work skins, so be sure to enable custom work skins if you don't have them enabled in your preferences!

__

_There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,_

_He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;_

_He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,_

_And they all lived together in a little crooked house._

* * *

__

Lee stood awash in the golden light of his kitchen window, looking out over the dried grass of his backyard. The half-length curtains, crookedly hand-sewn by Tenten and speckled with cheery sunflowers, fluttered in the soft breeze drifting through the window screen. 

It was autumn, and everything smelled of smoke. 

Behind the thin spines of the maples that separated his yard from his one-street-over neighbor’s, the sun was starting to set. Gloaming light, stained orange by the leaves’ last dying hurrahs, filtered through the pale yellow cotton of the curtains and painted his fingers gold where they drummed on the steel behind the sink. 

The house was old, narrow, taller than it was wide, and it seemed to tilt to and fro when the wind blew, the joists groaning and settling. It needed a lot of repair work, and the pipes spat rust before the water ran clear, the spigot juddering when Lee turned it on to wash the dust of moving day off his hands. But the house was his very own, his name on the deed and a mortgage looming in his bank account. Run-down though it may have been, his own house was the first sign of his true adult life opening up before him, perhaps a bit lately bloomed, but no less promising for it. 

Lee grinned, and the shine of his teeth in the sunset flashed back at him from the windowpane. 

Lee’s papa and his friends had already left, thanked handsomely for their assistance with boxes of pizza that sweated grease (Meat Lover’s for Tenten and Pimiento and Olive for Neji) and clanking brown bottles of beer that would sit untouched in Lee’s fridge until the next time he had company. Getting Gai into the house had been a bit of an ordeal, Neji and Lee each taking one side of his wheelchair to hoist him up the two bowing steps that led to the house’s sagging veranda. Lee had apologized profusely all along--he didn’t have permission yet from the building inspector to install a ramp. His papa would only ever be able to explore the first of the house’s three narrow storeys, but there was nothing to be done about that. Everything more accessible that Lee had looked at had been priced far out of his budget. 

Papa had declared himself the chief decorator, while Neji and Tenten sweated and huffed and dragged Lee’s heavy wooden furniture up the creaking stairwell. The result had been slightly more turtle-themed decor than Lee himself would have selected, but the reminders of his childhood home were more than welcome, and Papa seemed to thrive with a task at hand. It had been a challenge unto itself to prevent him from hoisting himself onto the kitchen counters to arrange Lee’s cabinets. 

The few remaining packed cardboard boxes tilted unevenly from their perches against the freshly painted walls, all sterile and bright white. Lee would get to them tomorrow, he promised himself, bright and early. He had no desire to live as Tenten did, in an apartment that was never quite fully unpacked, digging items out of old moving boxes that gradually transformed themselves into dusty, sagging storage containers. Lee had to turn himself sideways to angle past them and up the stairs to the largest of the house’s three bedrooms, his aching joints and muscles grumbling as he folded a slice of cold pizza in half and bit it off, slick melted cheese clinging to his teeth and too-sweet sauce coating his tongue. Lee was no slouch in the fitness department, but the work involved in moving an entire household in just a few hours tugged at the muscles differently, made them work harder. 

Lee clenched a fist. If he didn’t condition his body so that his next move was painless, he would subject himself to a full week of Papa’s 24-hour maximum training workout! Not that he planned to move again anytime soon. The extra bedrooms were an investment, a forever home for his family-to-be. Lee had no prospects for such a union--not _yet_, anyway--but he hoped that his future spouse and children would love the house as much as he did. 

And he loved it well, he thought, with all its creaks and quirks and oddities. He ran a finger along the round windowsill of his bedroom, the porthole of the window staring out into the narrow, cobbled street. The house was so closely situated to its next door neighbors that it had no windows on the sides, lest Lee find himself staring into his neighbor’s bedroom when he opened the curtains in the morning. The only sources of natural light were the panes of glass placed in the front and back of each slender room, gazing out into the uneven paving that marked the house’s side street and the scraggly, overgrown plot behind that excused itself as a backyard. The effect was one of oddly angled brightness, shafts of dusty light that seemed to compete with one another at sun-up and sun-down, and which left the interior in grey shadow during the overhead brightness of midday.

Windows aside, the house was bursting with its own curiosities--closets that were too thin to hold more than a single, puffy coat; spindly banisters cracked as if something had been thrown against them with great weight (these, Lee vowed to fix the following weekend); a single red-painted step on the way up to the third floor; and too-few studs in the framing, as Tenten discovered upon scanning the walls for a suitable location for Lee’s weight rack. 

And then, of course, there was the dumbwaiter. 

Lee stared at it out of the corner of his eye as he flopped, arms and legs akimbo, on the comfort of his old mattress and its fresh sheets, the scents of new paint and old dust warring in his nose. Above his bed on the ceiling was a water stain in the shape of a heart: though the walls had been painted before he moved in, the ceilings, it seemed, had not. 

Tenten had declared the dumbwaiter ‘_creepy as hell_’ when Lee had first shown his friends around the house, before he had settled on buying it. The realtor, who had been trying to sell the house for several months, after it had stood empty and fallen into disrepair, had offered to have it boarded up before Lee moved in, but he had declined. Lee himself found it charming, just another memento of the old house’s history and provenance, like a tiny, in-built doorway to the past. The door creaked when Lee had eased it open to reveal its interior, a square no larger than a child’s body, coated in peeling varnish. The iron wheel that raised and lowered the mechanism had long ago rusted in place, and despite both Lee’s and Neji’s best efforts and considerable elbow grease, neither had been able to free the thing and cause it to move. 

Tenten had refused to touch it. 

Getting the dumbwaiter back into action was at the very bottom of Lee’s to-do list, though. The contraption had little utility for a man who prided himself on racing himself up and down the stairs, attempting to beat his own personal best speed every time. And besides, the panel that opened into the kitchen had been covered up by Lee’s new refrigerator, with its humming white doors and pull-out freezer stuffed with protein-packed tupperware, courtesy of Gai. Lee had yet to find the dumbwaiter’s door on the upper floor either; he assumed it had been painted over. Perhaps he would find it in one of the third floor’s many tiny closets. 

Lee felt his eyes drifting closed as he lay there on his bed, shirtless but still in his most well-worn pair of jeans. Sweat and exhaustion stuck his eyelashes closed, his thoughts aimless and drifting. He had meant to shower before sleeping, but the heaviness of his limbs made the notion of standing to bathe seem an insurmountable task. _Tomorrow_, he thought, _I’ll do it tomorrow_. 

The last thing he saw before his eyes went dark was the door of the dumbwaiter, sealed shut. 

Lee awoke in blackness, his mouth cotton-dry and lips scratchy from snoring open-mouthed. He was no less tired than he had been before falling asleep; his own fault for ignoring his body’s well-oiled routines. His internal clock told him it must have been after midnight, but his own alarm clock with its glowing white face and old fashioned bells had yet to be liberated from the depths of packing tape and bubble wrap. 

His stomach lurched with the familiarity of vertigo, the tilting of his inner ear telling him he was sinking down, down. His stomach rose to meet his throat, the feeling like descending too fast in an elevator. He blinked sleep from his eyes but found the room still pitch black. The moon must have been directly overhead. It was a waning crescent tonight, anyway--as Lee knew from his long friendship with Tenten and her fascination with the occult--unlikely to shed much light through the heavy curtain drawn across his single porthole window. 

He stretched his arms and legs, reaching out to orient himself in the unfamiliarity of his new room, and his limbs dragged as if moving underwater. Much sooner than he expected, his hands and feet met walls. That was odd; his bed was only pressed up against a single wall behind the headboard. Lee felt around with groping palms and the soles of his stocking feet, seeking corners. The walls were all too close. 

He was in a box. 

He scowled at what he assumed was the ceiling. He must have still been dreaming. 

Above him he heard a warbling sound, faint but not growing distant as it should have if he were falling like he felt he was. If anything, it seemed to be coming closer. Closing in on him from above. 

Lee blinked his eyes against the black and found no more illumination than before. The sound resolved into clarity, less than a foot from his face. Crying, but not the way a human cried. There was an edge to the sound, raw and animal, like the whining of a dog denied its bone or a cat begging for its food. The noise drew closer, inches from his face. Lee felt hot, wet breath against the tip of his nose. 

He woke up with his eyes watering, his throat sore like he’d just finished a crying jag. 

On the wall, the door of the dumbwaiter hung slightly ajar.  


* * *

  


**Moving Day!**

Hello, everyone, and welcome to my blog! My friend Tenten said I should start this so I can practice my spelling and grammar. (I have always been bad at it, ever since I was a little kid.)

Anyway, my name is Lee, and it’s so nice to meet you! I just moved into a new house, so I thought that would be a good topic for my blog!

My house is super old, so it needs a lot of work! I’ll show you all updates of the different DIY projects I’m working on to get my house in tip-top shape.

My house has been around for a very long time. I think the realtor said almost a hundred years! Wow! Nobody has lived here for a long time, so it’s in pretty bad shape in some places.

Here are some pictures of my house from a long time ago. You can see that it hasn’t changed much since it was built!

[](https://i.imgur.com/k2qxcRG.jpg)

This picture is from right after the house was first built! Look at that cute kitty! He didn’t come with the house, unfortunately. :( 

[](https://i.imgur.com/niMNGJp.jpg)

Sorry about the bad quality of this one, I had to scan it in from an old newspaper in the library. I can’t believe my house was in the newspaper! It was a big deal when it was built, because it’s so unusual looking. I love it, though. I think it has character!

[](https://i.imgur.com/gBz2uKt.jpg)

Here is a more recent picture of the house. I don’t know who those kids are. I guess they lived here before? I’m the one who censored their faces ... They didn’t look like that in real life! :P 

[](https://i.imgur.com/3RDVXn1.jpg)

And finally, here’s what the house looks like today! Well, not exactly today, this is the photo from the realtor’s listing, but it looks basically the same right now (I checked when I went outside to get the paper this morning! ;P)

I haven’t had the chance to put in too much work yet. I would show you pictures of the inside of the house, but most of them didn’t turn out. It’s really dark in here, even during the daytime. The first thing I’m going to do is replace all the light fixtures!

In the meantime, I’m still trying to get everything unpacked. There’s a big stack of boxes in one of the upstairs bedrooms that I still need to work through.

[](https://i.imgur.com/Qx3USRy.png)

This is one of the handful of pictures that actually turned out: a bunch of my moving boxes! If I don’t have them unpacked by Wednesday, I’m going to weed the entire back garden with no breaks!

I’m also still getting used to the house, which is cutting into my DIY time. Because the house is so old, all the counters and floors are kind of crooked. My stuff keeps falling off the tables and shelves! I’ll need to readjust everything so it’s level with the house’s floors ... I’m starting to run out of cups!

[ ](https://i.imgur.com/4I0Qo1u.jpg)

The first two casualties of the uneven shelves. Two of my _favorite_ coffee cups! My friend Neji gave them to me for my birthday. I had to take them outside to get the picture to show up this clearly ... all of the other ones turned out splotchy and gray. I’m going to try to glue them back together, though, never fear!

Well, I think that’s enough for a first entry. I will write more as soon as I have my projects started!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, sign ups for the [GaaLeeGaa Holiday Exchange](https://gaaleegaaholidayexchange.tumblr.com) are going live tomorrow (October 15th)! I hope everyone will participate - it is a great opportunity to exchange all kinds of different fanworks with fellow fans of the pairing, and hopefully make some new friends along the way!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made a playlist for this fic! You can listen to it [here on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAt8PAzAOtkS1njoucJgIWXMhLzDDGtUx). 
> 
> Also, I hope everyone who wanted to had the chance to sign up for the GaaLee / LeeGaa Holiday Exchange! There was such an amazing turnout - thanks to everyone who signed up! Even if you didn’t have the chance to sign up, you can follow the exchange on Tumblr [@gaaleegaaholidayexchange](https://gaaleegaaholidayexchange.tumblr.com) or on Twitter [@gaaleeexchange](https://twitter.com/gaaleeexchange). Gifts will start being posted December 1st!

  


* * *

  


_At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. Never really looked. Not the first time they toured the house. Not when the inspector showed them through it. They'd measured rooms and told the movers where to set the couch and piano, hauled in everything they owned, and never really stopped to look at the living room floor._

_They pretend. Then on the first morning they come downstairs, there it is, scratched in the white-oak floor:_

_GET OUT_

_Some new owners pretend a friend has done it as a joke. Others are sure it's because they didn't tip the movers. A couple of nights later, a baby starts to cry from inside the north wall of the master bedroom._

_This is when they usually call._

\- Lullaby, Chuck Palahniuk

* * *

  


* * *

  


**Pest Control**

Hello everyone! I wanted to start this week off by working on my light fixtures, but things have not quite worked out as planned, because . . . I think I might have a visitor in my house! And not the kind I invited, either!

But before I talk about that, I wanted to ask . . . did anyone else feel the earthquake on Friday? The building didn’t shake while I was at work, and I didn’t see anything about it on the news, but when I got home . . . just look at this mess!

[](https://i.imgur.com/xjJax8K.jpg)

Almost every dish in the house was broken! And when I got into the kitchen properly . . . 

[](https://i.imgur.com/B5kZPpL.jpg)

All the drawers and cabinets were open! I figured something major must have happened. That’s at least the work of a magnitude 5 earthquake, right? (Is that how earthquakes work? I’m not sure.) Whatever it was, it didn’t reach across town, but it really tore my place up! 

On top of all the sweeping (and bandaging my hand - broken ceramic is _sharp!_), I have been dealing with another little problem this week . . . 

[](https://i.imgur.com/V0ImCsh.jpg)

Raccoons!!! >:( 

I have been hearing scratching coming from the dumbwaiter shaft at night. The shaft ends in the kitchen, so I think a critter (or two) must have gotten in and is looking for a snack! It’s way too loud to be a mouse, so I’m pretty sure it has to be raccoons.

[](https://i.imgur.com/YuxiWWs.jpg)

I haven’t caught them in the act yet, but doesn’t that look like the perfect space for a furry friend?

Raccoons are very cute, and I don’t want to hurt them, but I did not invite them into my house and it’s very rude of them to be intruding! I went online and found a bunch of different recipes for a safe pest spray that you can make at home.

[](https://i.imgur.com/LewASNG.jpg)

So, here is my recipe for **Dr. Lee’s Anti-Raccoon Spray!**

Mix together one part water and one part apple-cider vinegar. Add about a tablespoon of salt (this is supposed to stop the vinegar from attracting bugs), and a tablespoon of baking soda. The vinegar smell keeps the raccoons out, and the baking soda stops it from smelling too strongly for humans. Also, one website said raccoons don’t like baking soda. I can’t imagine why, it keeps my fridge smelling fresh and clean!

Then you just spray the raccoon repellant around wherever you think they might be coming in. I put some in the dumbwaiter shaft, under my refrigerator, and on the trash cans for good measure.

And, just in case that doesn’t work, I have a secret weapon . . . 

[ ](https://i.imgur.com/PoebwCM.jpg)

Mothballs! (Don’t worry, they’re safe for the raccoons too, they just don’t like the smell.)

* * *

The first Sunday Lee spent in his new house, Neji and Tenten came over for dinner.

“So, how are you liking things?” Tenten asked, leaning back against the dark oak of Lee’s sturdiest kitchen chair (declared hers after she had tipped too many over and broken their backs). On the table in front of each of them, plates piled high with spaghetti noodles steamed merrily. The whole kitchen smelled like warm garlic and marinara. 

Tenten peered at him over a frankly unreasonably large pile of meatballs.

"It's great!" Lee chirped, but the scrape of air through his voice box felt hollow. He carefully arranged the salad bowl directly in front of Neji's plate, so that he would reach for the greens rather than more carbs when he inevitably went for seconds. (This strategy, Lee had discovered, prevented Neji from complaining about his waistline after dinner, and made it much easier to convince him to return for the next week's get-together.)

"I brought you some more mugs, by the way," Tenten mentioned, dragging a clanking bag out from under her chair.

Lee peered inside. Within shone the pale, dented tin of a half-dozen cast-off remains of a delivery of camping dishes from the outdoor equipment store Tenten worked at.

“Did you steal them? Neji asked, smoothly arching a dark eyebrow.

Tenten blushed. “They were going to be thrown out anyway.”

“Thank you very much!” Lee closed the bag and set it on the kitchen counter, one of the few places he had found where things _wouldn’t_ crash to the ground in the middle of the night. “Coffee just doesn’t taste the same out of a plastic cup.”

“Did you get the shelves situated?” Neji leaned back in his chair and tapped on one wooden strut with a sharp knuckle. 

“No. I think my level might be broken? I’ve re-seated them a few times.” Lee warily eyed the spackled nail holes dotting the wall. 

“Levels can’t really _break_, Lee.” Tenten cut her eyes at him. “Unless you cracked the glass somehow.”

“Definitely not!” Lee protested. “But . . . maybe the floor is uneven, too. That could be why the level reads straight when the shelves are obviously still crooked.”

“That’s not how levels work.” Neji’s eyebrow crept closer to the widow’s peak of his hairline. “Or gravity. Which is what _makes_ the level work.” 

“I mean, the floors _do_ creak a lot when the house settles!” Lee cried. “Maybe they’re shifting around?”

“The floors? Or the surface of the earth?” Neji’s eyes were dangerously close to rolling. “Like your highly localized earthquake?” 

“We can settle this right now,” Tenten interrupted their bickering, pointing to the hallway. “Lee, go get the level. I’ll check your floors _and_ your shelves.” 

The hallway light guttered. Beyond, the living room was patchy gray. Thick clouds clustered beyond the windows, lying low and close to the fence posts. 

Lee pried open the hallway closet, which was over-stuffed with rollers and paint cans and tarpaulins. The door, swollen in the cold damp of the storm threatening outside, groaned and creaked in protest. He had to jiggle the tarnished brass handle quite a few times before it came unstuck. 

If he remembered correctly, the level was on the top shelf . . . Lee shifted up onto his tiptoes, long arms reaching for the back of the uppermost shelf. A paint roller came loose and clattered to the floor. 

“You okay in there?” Tenten called from the kitchen.

“Fine!” Lee yelled back, but his voice was strained from the effort. Even as tall as he was, he couldn’t _quite_ reach the back of the top shelf. He would need to improvise. He could return to the kitchen and retrieve a chair, or . . . 

His eyes alit on the milk crates that were temporarily serving as his side table stacked haphazardly next to the couch. He gently removed the lamp from atop them, set it on the floor, and carried them to the closet door. He leapt up nimbly, until his gangly form was balanced across their slats. The plywood of them creaked in warning. 

Leaning forward, the balls of his stockinged feet clinging to the thickest part of the wood, he attempted to rest most of his weight on the shelf. He made a quick, silent promise to whatever god might be watching him that he would do this as quickly as possible and try not to tempt fate or the laws of physics. His hand groped in the back of the unlit closet, and he clenched his eyes shut, biting his tongue as his fingers sought the level. 

Something cold brushed across the back of his neck, ruffling the tidily shorn edge of his bowl cut. It felt like a draught, or . . . not like a draught at all, more like the tracing of cool fingers. 

Lee flinched. Just at the same moment, his fingers found the textured iron edge of the level. The wood of the milk crates groaned. 

The crates slid backwards, a full six inches across the floor, away from the closet. Lee’s knees banged against each other. Still clinging to the level, he wobbled. 

Then he cratered to the floor with a mighty crash, behind-over-teakettle. 

Footsteps clattered down the hall behind him. 

“Are you okay?” Tenten panted over his shoulder. 

For a moment, Lee could only stare blankly at the aperture of the darkened closet. For a second, he had been almost _sure_ that he had felt someone _push_ the crates. 

He shook his head slowly. 

“You’re . . . not okay?” Tenten said softly.

Of course he was okay. He had just had a little spill. It certainly wasn’t the first time he had fallen due to his own clumsiness, and it was certain not to be the last. And _of course_ the crates had slid across the floor like that--he had just mopped earlier that day, since he was expecting company, and the floor still shone with the waxy coating. 

“I’m fine,” he replied finally, but his voice felt brittle. “I found the level.”

A second, softer set of footsteps approached up the hall.

“The garlic bread is getting cold,” Neji said, then sniffed. He crossed his arms in disaffectation, even as Lee gained his feet and surreptitiously checked his behind for splinters. 

“I can’t believe you didn’t even come to see what happened!” Tenten yelled, whirling on him with fire in her eyes. 

“Lee’s always falling off of things,” Neji said primly, though he shifted his shoulders as if turning away would shield him from Tenten’s fury. “It hasn’t killed him yet.” This time, his eyes truly did roll. He stuck his hand out towards Lee and snapped his fingers. “Let me see that level.” 

The level worked just fine, despite Lee’s tumble. Tenten even took it outside and compared it to the one in the backseat of her truck. The two devices sat there on her truck bed under her and Lee's squatted-down, squinting scrutiny, bubbles of fluid shifting identically. Overhead, the storm clouds roiled, threatening to deposit their watery payload. 

“Oh,” Lee said, searching his mind for another explanation. 

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and clapped him on the shoulder. Lee jumped. 

“The garlic bread,” Neji called to them from the bowing boards of the porch.

A fat raindrop fell from the sky and trailed down Tenten’s truck window. A second landed squarely on the tip of her button nose. 

She shrieked and ran for the house. Lee followed.

* * *

Once they were stuffed with noodles and the dishes sat drying in the plastic rack beside the sink, they retired to the living room. 

The creaky springs of the ancient couch were 'a butt-killer,' so said Tenten, so she sat cross-legged on the threadbare rug, shuffling cards from hand to hand. 

“War or Old Maid?” she asked. 

Neji scooted forward in his pirated kitchen chair, picking at a fleck of dishwashing detritus on the front of his shirt that was invisible to everyone but him.

“You know, _adults_ play poker or gin rummy,” he drawled. “Why don’t we ever play grown-up games?”

“I do not agree with gambling!” Lee shouted from the couch, squarely in the middle cushion that had fitted itself to his posterior over the course of too many years. “And gin makes me sick!”

“That’s not what gin--”

“How about Go Fish,” Tenten suggested. 

“That’s my favorite!” 

“I know, Lee.”

An hour later, with the storm howling in full force outside, Tenten excused herself to the restroom. 

Neji leaned forward and pretended to be studying the wood grain of the table while he slid a fingernail under Tenten’s hand of cards. 

“Neji, no cheating!”

Neji looked up at Lee with an expression of mock scandal. 

“How dare you--” he began.

Down the hallway, the bathroom door slammed. Tenten came rushing into the living room, hands still dripping. When she saw both boys staring at her, mouths agape, she casually dusted her wet hands on the front of her pants. 

“Your bathroom’s, uh . . . ” She coughed, shifting from foot to foot. “ . . . pretty spooky there, Lee.”

“What do you mean?”

“It felt like someone was watching me the whole time I was in there. I swear I could feel eyes on the back of my neck.”

“That might be the raccoon,” Lee offered.

“You have a _raccoon!?_ My god, what else is wrong with this place?” Tenten’s mouth dropped open in a horrified scowl. “But, no--I don’t think I would notice if an animal was watching me. It felt like--you know when you’re out in public, and you just _feel_ someone watching you, and then you turn around and, sure enough, some creep is eyeballing you?”

“I saw a story on the news about a woman who had a homeless man living in her crawlspace,” Neji offered. “She only found out because all her food was going missing, so she put up a camera and caught him sneaking into her kitchen in the middle of the night.”

Tenten shivered. “That’s officially the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I think I would know if a homeless person was living in my house with me,” Lee said. “And I don’t even have a crawlspace.”

“If he’s thin enough, he could be living in the dumbwaiter shaft.” Neji cupped his hands around his mouth and pitched his voice louder. “Hello, person who lives in Lee’s house? Could you stop breaking all his cups, please? Your habits have turned Tenten to larceny. Also, it’s a crime to watch girls in the restroom without their permission.”

As if in response, a massive thunder clap rolled outside. The glass of the light fixtures shuddered in their moorings. 

“Stop it!” Tenten swatted at him. “Ugh, now you’re really giving me the creeps. Can we just get back to the game?”

“Whose turn is it?” Lee looked up from tidying the draw pile, eager for a change in topic, his face hot with an embarrassed flush. He desperately wanted his friends to enjoy his new home, and this whole conversation was making him feel rather put-out. 

“Neji’s.”

Neji fanned out his hand of cards officiously, made all the more ridiculous by the fact he only had two cards left. “Tenten, do you have any . . . threes?”

Tenten pretended to peruse her hand with great scrutiny. “Hmm . . . ” She drummed on her chin with her fingers. “ . . . Go Fish!”

“Damnit!” Neji slapped the table hard enough that their tin mugs of coffee rattled. The draw pile fell out of its neat stack. 

“Cheaters never prosper!” Lee raised a hand to wag a warning finger. 

With a hiss of electricity, the lightbulb in the lamp nearest to Neji burst. 

Tenten jumped out of her seat. 

“You know, it’s really getting late. I should head home.”

“Are you sure?” Lee laid his cards face-down on the table, eyebrows furrowing. “We were in the middle of a hand. And it’s raining! I even set up the guest bedrooms!”

Tenten just shook her head. Her arms crossed defensively across her chest. 

“Neji?”

Neji stood with slightly more grace, but his eyes didn’t leave the burnt-out bulb. A tendril of smoke curled up from the now-empty light socket. “She’s my ride,” he said. “You should really call an electrician,” he added, gently. 

Neji didn’t even take any of the leftover garlic bread with him.

* * *

Lee woke up unable to move. The room was completely dark, and he could scarcely breathe, could hardly shift his eyes left or right. _Sleep paralysis_, he recognized almost immediately. The feeling was not unfamiliar, but there was nothing quite like the crushing terror of being utterly immobilized by your own body. 

_Move,_ he willed himself, and failed. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw it: a dark shadow approaching his bed. _It’s all just a hallucination,_ he reminded himself, _it will pass in a few seconds_. But his chest was caving in. He couldn’t feel his heart, but he was sure it was racing. Static buzzed in his ears. 

He didn’t blink, but suddenly the shadow was on top of him, crushing him, glaring gold eyes centimeters from his face. He urged himself to scream and-- 

Finally, Lee lurched upright. He flicked on the bedroom light, panting, and the bulb fizzed and shivered. His face felt crusty with dried salt.

He stared down at his hands, palms-up on the fraying surface of his quilt. Around each wrist, there were four red marks. Parallel, like fingers. Or claws. 

* * *

**How to Patch a Wall**

Hello again, everyone! I hope your weeks have been filled with joy and passion!

This week, I worked on re-doing all the house’s light fixtures. The problem with having an old house is that the electrical system is old, too, and my little old house is no different. Traditional lightbulbs don’t last long around here. They’re always going out at the worst possible moment. Earlier this week, one of them popped while I was in the shower! That was definitely not a fun way to start my morning, cleaning glass out of a wet bathtub!

I bought some energy efficient bulbs at the hardware store, and those seem to be doing a little bit better . . . _but_ the light looked so harsh and unpleasant in the light fixtures that the house came with, so I needed to do some redecorating.

First things first, I repainted all the fixtures from bronze to a hip and modern black. Usually, you would need to take the fixtures off the wall for this, but since I was repainting anyway, I just sprayed them directly onto the wall! Since I wasn’t keeping the shades, I didn’t even bother taking those off first. Quick and easy!

[](https://i.imgur.com/b6FWOdP.jpg)

(Look at those awful old glass shades! If I was a lightbulb, I would burn out too!)

Once the paint was dry, I just removed the shades and replaced them (and the bulbs) with the new ones I bought!

[](https://i.imgur.com/DJ0fLt3.jpg)

There, much better!

My second project this week was wall repair, and let me tell you, I was _not_ expecting to have to do that one! Any of my friends will tell you, I am a pretty clumsy person, and moving into a new house hasn’t changed that at all!

Tuesday morning, I was on my way down the stairs, and I thought I heard a cat meowing. I don’t have a cat, so I was worried one of the neighbor’s pets might have snuck in! I turned around, tripped over my feet, and fell right into the wall.

[](https://i.imgur.com/KNj0HyH.jpg)

Boom! Behind right through the drywall! That was not how I was planning to spend my Tuesday!

Even though this was not the first time I left a hole in a wall, it was my first time repairing it on my own. . . . Well, not quite _all_ on my own. My papa has been putting up with my clumsiness since I was a little boy, so he was nice enough to come over and show me how it’s done!

Lucky for me, the hole was on the first floor, so it only took a little extra elbow grease to get papa and his wheelchair up the front steps. Good thing we both spend so much time at the gym!

To patch a hole in a wall, first you have to remove all the old debris. And boy, was there ever debris in this wall!

[](https://i.imgur.com/IHACOL3.jpg)

When I pulled out the drywall, I found this weird piece of wood! I thought it might be driftwood, but Papa said it doesn’t look like any driftwood he’s ever seen. He’s going to take it to his friend at the Community College to have it looked at. Papa's friend is a forestry management professor, so if anyone can identify weird old wood, it's sure to be him.

Anyway, once you have cleared out all the debris, you want to measure a square about two inches around the hole. You can actually see where we already outlined the square in that first picture. Then, you’re going to measure and cut a piece of fresh drywall about the size of the square you outlined. Next, you’ll need to mark those two extra inches off with a pen or knife, in order to take the hard part of the drywall off, leaving only the paper backing around the edges, so it looks like this: 

[](https://i.imgur.com/HEYQEiL.jpg)

Next, you are going to reshape the hole so it’s nice and square, and the same size as the drywall square you cut (not including the size of the paper backing). You can do this by tracing the new drywall square onto the wall with a pencil, and then cutting that shape. It’s important to be VERY CAREFUL when you’re re-cutting the hole. Like you can see in this picture, there might be wires in the wall that you don’t want to cut! (Or spare pieces of wood, haha!) I have enough electrical problems _without_ cutting the wires apart!

[](https://i.imgur.com/Jdys5dP.jpg)

Now you should have a square of drywall (with extra backing) the exact same size and shape as the hole in your wall! Just slap some putty on the paper backing and stick that drywall right into the hole. (I forgot to take a picture of this part, sorry, but you can picture it in your mind :D Me and Papa got too excited about the spackling.)

[](https://i.imgur.com/8FabY8B.jpg)

Spackle over the whole shebang, and be sure to overlap onto the wall a little bit just to be on the safe side. Next comes the worst part . . . waiting for the spackle to dry! Me and papa passed the time with a push-up contest. (He won, but one day I will beat him! If I don’t, I’ll spackle one hundred holes all on my own!)

[ ](https://i.imgur.com/jyv25jB.jpg)

Finally, sand the whole thing down, add your coat of paint and . . . ta-da! Good as new! Now just be careful going down the stairs, and look before you leap (or trip!) :D 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please remember to enable creator work skins in your settings to be able to enjoy the multimedia components of this story. This chapter includes video and audio. The video is captioned, but YouTube captions are a little fickle in their timing so there may be slight timing errors. Soundcloud unfortunately does not allow captioning, so I included an audio description in the "Track Description". You may have to click through to the Soundcloud website (click on the track name) to access this. If there's anything else I can do to make this accessible, please let me know!
> 
> Oh and shout-out to [my wife, trustmeimthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustmeimthe) for helping with the multimedia and letting me record her!

* * *

  


_What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unmourned, well, you get the drift._

_As a counselor once told me - a counselor for Disaffected Youth, I might add: "You like that crap because it reminds you of you."_

\- House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

* * *

* * *

Lee was up and moving before the sun had fully risen, carrying the last of his boxes from their position stacked in the stairwell to their proper homes. He was ripping the packing tape off the final box, folding it under his arm for the recycling bin when he heard it.

_Meow_

He turned to look behind him on instinct, the bulk of the cardboard slapping the narrow wall of the staircase and shaking dust loose from the crown molding. Had the neighbor’s cat gotten in again, or--?

_Meow_

The sound was insistent this time, and he felt something furry trail the back of his ankles, the flick of a pointed tail in the hollow of the back of his knee. He turned again, a full 360-degree circle, and saw nothing. 

But then--there! Skating past the landing to the third floor, the slink of a shadow low to the ground, the flash of a golden eye. He dropped the cardboard and let it sled down the stairway behind him as he scrambled up the steps to catch the cat. 

“Here, kitty kitty!” he called, crouching low and trying to make himself look less intimidating. He had never been a cat person; his papa had always had dogs when he was younger, and the thought of wrangling a stray (feral? runaway?) cat left him feeling quite out of his depth. 

_Meow_

The sound was behind him again. How had it--? He whirled around again, pirouetting on one foot in a motion that recalled his childhood dance training. That hint of shadow-black fur slunk quick past the entrance to the landing of the second floor now, and Lee hurried to follow it. 

His toe caught on the red step. 

There was a _crack_ of old wood ripping from rusted nails, and the board of the stair went flying down the stairwell with a clatter. It skidded across the pale wood of the second-floor landing and lay there like a blood stain, accusing. 

And inside the hole where his step once was, where Lee expected to find nothing but moldering crossbeams and wear-and-tear the building inspector must have missed, was . . .

* * *

Team Gai Forever!  
  
Do you guys remember the red step in my house?  
Tenten  
Ugh, yes, so creepy! Have you gotten around to painting it yet?  
Not quite...  
But there was something inside it  
Well, a couple somethings  
Neji  
???  
[](https://i.imgur.com/r3mk8QQ.jpg)  
Tenten  
What the hell are those things?!  
I don’t know! I think they’re the same as the wood I found in the wall last week … Papa is supposed to ask his friend about it  
There was something else too!  
Neji  
?!?!  
[](https://i.imgur.com/jfijpmE.jpg)  
A new friend!  
Neji  
!!!!  
Haha, the house is full of surprises!  
Tenten  
Holy shit, Lee that’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen! That was in your HOUSE??? Under your STEPS?!?!  
Aww, I think he’s kind of cute  


* * *

The walkway to the house was slick with fallen leaves knocked down by the previous night’s rainstorm. The wheels of Gai’s chair squeaked as he made his way up the path. 

“Papa!” Lee called from the porch, slamming the door open so hard it rebounded against the wall. “Let me come get you! It’s slippery out there!”

“Not to worry, Lee!” Gai shouted in return, biceps working hard as the wheels lost traction yet again on the wet leaf litter scattering the ground. “Nothing a little mind over matter can’t handle!”

Lee had already leapt from the porch, foregoing the steps entirely, and he skidded to a halt at the handles of Gai’s wheelchair, feet slip-sliding on the leaves. “Please! It’s my fault for not clearing the path when I knew you were coming.” 

Gai crossed his arms with a _harrumph_, but he allowed Lee to take the handles of the chair and steer him to the foot of the steps. Lee was glad he had left the door standing open, because it was an act of some effort to heft his papa up the porch steps and onto the living room couch before returning to retrieve the wheelchair. 

Once Gai had transferred back to his chair, he regarded Lee with a delighted grin.

“I have exciting news for you!” he boomed. 

The lightbulbs in the many lamps Lee had positioned all around the room fizzed and flickered in response. They had been struggling all day against the grey and rolling clouds outside, despite the fact that Lee had nearly doubled the number of light fixtures in the past few weeks. He had quickly learned he needed backups when the bulbs inevitably blew. He swore sometimes he spent more money on lightbulbs than on actual home repair. 

Gai didn’t seem to notice the power surge, already rooting around in the saddlebag of his chair. With a _hah!_ he pulled a thin stick from the bottom of the bag, looking a little worse for wear. There was a teabag string twined around the base, and a half-unwrapped breath mint adhered to the thing’s porous surface.

“Remember this?” 

“The weird stick from the wall!” Lee clapped his hands. “Did I tell you I found more of them when that stair broke the other day?”

Gai frowned. “More?” 

“I was chasing after that cat, and--” 

“What cat?” 

“Oh, there’s a cat that seems to get in now and then! I don’t know if it belongs to the neighbors or if it’s just a stray, but it seems to be keeping the raccoons away, at least. Anyway he was running up and down the stairs, and I was trying to catch him, and--Oh, never mind!” Lee’s laugh caught in his mouth. “You didn’t come all this way to listen to my long stories. I’ll show you the other ones later. I’m just surprised I didn’t tell you about them!” 

Gai shook his head slowly, and the shine of his hair in the pale grey lamplight wobbled strangely with the motion. “No, you didn’t mention it. But I found out what it is!” 

“Oh!” Lee scrambled to sit on the couch and leaned forward eagerly, feeling much like he had as a child, listening to his papa’s bedtime stories of heroic knights and dashing squires. 

“I went and spoke to my old friend Yamato . . . you might remember him, actually. We’ve been friends since before you were even a twinkle in my eye!” Gai clapped Lee on the shoulder and squeezed. Papa’s grip had only gotten stronger since his injury, Lee thought, wincing at the pressure. “He works at the community college. So, I went over there to ask him what this thing was . . .”

“And?” Lee’s fingers tightened in the threadbare cover of the couch cushion, craning forward for the answer to this mystery.

“He didn’t know either!” 

Lee slumped backwards in defeat. 

“So you _didn’t_ find out what it was.” His lower lip jutted out against his will. He felt every inch a petulant, disappointed child. The lights seemed to lower with the sinking of his shoulders. 

“No, no, I did!” Gai brandished the piece of wood with characteristic panache. “That’s the thing! He sent me to the reference library at the university . . . I haven’t been there in years! And wouldn’t you believe, the librarian there is an old friend of mine, too!” 

This surprised Lee not at all. His papa seemed to know nearly everyone in town, or at least they seemed to know him. He chalked it up to a combination of his papa’s gregarious nature and his old fitness broadcasts that still played late nights on local access television. 

Lee nodded encouragingly, waiting for Gai to abandon the mental track of his reminiscence to focus back on the matter at hand. 

“Well, we got to talking about the old days. You know, we went to school together, years and years ago, long before you came into my life. It was so nice to catch up--”

A lightbulb burst.

Lee leapt to his feet and hurried to the wall sconce by the window. 

“I’m sorry! That happens all the time. Let me just go get a new lightbulb, and I will be right back so you can continue your story.” 

When he returned to the room, fresh lightbulb in hand and a towel in the other to wrap the broken glass, Gai’s face was pale and grey. 

“Are you okay?” Lee asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Gai turned to look at him with hollow eyes. For a long moment he just stared at Lee, unblinking. 

“No,” he said finally, “nothing like that.” He threw his head back, booming a laugh. “There’s no such thing as ghosts! Now where was I?”

“You were telling me about the library,” Lee reminded him, sweeping the broken glass into a dustpan. 

“Right!” Gai made a fist, and the wood in his hand creaked. 

“Ah, I can take that,” Lee said, feeling suddenly protective over the odd little piece of wood. He plucked it from his papa’s fingers on his way to dump the glass in the trashcan. “I’ll put it with the others later.”

“Good idea! I’m sure the cactus skeletons will make a lovely display all together!”

Lee’s eyebrows furrowed. “Cactus . . . skeletons?”

Gai clapped a hand over his mouth. “Darn it!” he shouted through his fingers. “I’ve ruined the grand reveal!”

“Cactuses have skeletons?” Lee held the dried piece of plant matter up to one of the remaining lit bulbs. It cast odd, irregular patterns across the wall, shadows kaleidoscoping as he turned it.

“It took Iruka and I quite a while to find the photos to match, but yes!” Gai gestured grandly, slipping easily into pedagogy. “When cactuses dry out, they leave those strange sticks behind. They’re called ‘ribs’.” Gai thumped his own chest in demonstration. “People use them for building and art and all sorts of things!” 

Lee pursed his lips. “I haven’t seen any cactuses growing around here.” 

“Maybe someone bought them at a curiosity shop?” Gai shrugged. He turned around in his chair and pulled the knapsack hanging from the handlebars into his lap. 

“Maybe . . .” Lee frowned. But there had been so many shapes and sizes of them, no two quite alike. 

“Now, Lee, for my _other_ surprise!” Gai held a stack of tupperware aloft. “Papa’s famous beef curry!”  


* * *

  


**Strange Happenings**

Have you ever heard something that nobody else heard? Or seen something that wasn’t there?

That’s been happening to me a lot recently. My friends think my house might be haunted, but I know that is ridiculous! I don’t believe in ghosts at all.

At first I thought it must be the raccoons, but my papa’s friend is an exterminator, and he came and didn’t find any evidence of pests, furry or otherwise. It’s a relief to know my mothballs are working, but it doesn’t explain the noises in the walls and the dumbwaiter at night. I want to think it’s just the house settling, but I’m worried it might be something else.

My stuff keeps getting moved around, too. Either that or I'm losing my mind as much as I’m losing my keys and wallet and cellphone. My house has a place for everything, and everything goes in its place . . . until things get moved around when I’m not paying attention!

I want to find a reasonable explanation for the odd things that have been going on. I looked around online, too, but all I saw were people talking about carbon monoxide poisoning. I’ve had my CO detectors checked twice now, and they are in perfect working condition, so it can’t be that.

One of my friends got me thinking about burglars, so I got a few inexpensive security cameras online. I guess I was thinking that if someone or something was walking around here at night or if the neighbor’s cat was getting in again, I would catch it on tape and then at least I would know if I needed to call the police or pest control!

Well, I didn’t see any people _or_ any animals, but I did see this. This video is from the camera outside my bedroom door.

I’m sorry, I know this has nothing to do with home repair at all, but . . . it’s strange, isn’t it? Do any of you have any ideas? Could I be sleepwalking? Is it changes in air pressure rattling the door? Has anything like this ever happened to you?

* * *

Lee arranged the cactus skeletons neatly in a vase on his bedroom windowsill across from the dumbwaiter, where the morning sun could throw their warped shadows across his bed. 

He grew used to strange draughts and to taking his showers in the dim of the unlit bathroom, the lightbulbs in there perpetually blown, with only the sunlight from the hallway for illumination. At least the poor lighting kept him from staring at the mildew spot growing in the corner of the bathroom wall, the heart-shaped one that almost matched the stain on his bedroom ceiling. He kept telling himself he would climb up there and wash it off one day, but every time he left the bathroom he seemed to forget about it until the next time he showered. 

Despite what Tenten said, Lee didn’t feel scared of the house at all. Ghosts weren’t real, of course--Papa was right--no matter how many times Lee’s bedroom door opened and closed on its own, no matter how many times the dumbwaiter rattled, no matter how many times he chased that _darn cat_ only to have it vanish soundlessly around a corner. 

And, sure, sometimes the things that happened _did_ frighten him, or at least startle him. Too many times he thought he saw foggy handprints in the steam on the bathroom mirror, as if someone had been standing on the other side, pressed up against the glass and waiting to be let in. 

Then there was the time he looked up from washing his face, rubbing his eyes with a towel to see another face where his should have been, one with bright eyes in dark hollows. Hands on the glass, fingers curled like claws. An open mouth, screaming soundlessly. A vision that persisted even when he reminded himself he was just seeing things. 

But as soon as he wiped the water from his eyes, the face was gone. It was just his own familiar self staring back at himself, plain dark eyes and an unremarkable expression. The water must have been too hot, he thought. And then he drank a glass of juice and sat under the kitchen ceiling fan until his head stopped spinning. 

If it _was_ a ghost (which it wasn’t), at least it didn’t seem to be malicious. It was just . . . particular. It didn’t seem to like loud noises. The T.V. or stereo would turn itself off when Lee cranked the volume too loud, and every time something shattered it seemed to come right after Lee or Papa or one of his friends had been shouting. 

Sometimes the . . . oddity (which was all Lee was willing to admit it was) was even almost _playful_. Like the time Lee was halfway through texting the group chat: **Have either of you seen my keys?** It was the morning after his game night with Neji and Tenten. He was wandering around fruitlessly in his pajamas on the second floor, swearing one of them must have grabbed his keys on the way out the door. He always hung his keys up on the hook by the front door, _always_. 

Then behind him, a jingling. Like the bell on a cat’s collar. 

He turned around to find the dumbwaiter door cracked in his bedroom, and in the middle of his bedroom doorway: his keys. Just sitting there on the carpet as if they had been there all along, shining faintly in the morning sun through the porthole window. He patted at his backside as if he would magically uncover a pocket that he knew his sweatpants didn’t have, some explanation for how his keys got from the front door to where they now sat. 

And once he swore--_he swore_\--he felt someone pinch his butt as he was getting out of the shower.

So, no, Lee wasn’t _scared_. If anything, he felt . . . a little sad. At a loss. He couldn’t help but feel as if someone was speaking to him in a language he couldn’t understand. And he didn’t know where or how to find a translator.

* * *

“Have you ever heard of EVPs?” Tenten asked him one Friday morning over their brunch dishes. Between them on the kitchen table sat the teddy bear, newly outfitted with a red ribbon necktie and freshly-sewn button eyes, Tenten’s version of a peace offering. 

Lee swallowed a forkful of egg before responding. “No, what are they?”

Tenten swirled her mimosa in its plastic cup. Lee had long ago done away with any sort of kitchenware that could be broken if it fell to the floor. “It stands for electronic voice phenomena. It’s supposed to be a way that spirits can communicate with us. Basically you just record a quiet room or play some white noise, and the ghost talks straight into the tape, even if you can’t hear it.” 

“There isn’t a ghost,” Lee reminded her.

She rolled her eyes. “Sure, you just keep seeing vanishing cats and getting your shirt grabbed by things you can’t see for no reason.”

“I caught my shirt on a nail running to answer the door,” Lee replied hotly. He was acutely aware of the tiny hole on his side seam, through which air now blew. The sensation was acutely ticklish, like being stroked by a single cold finger.

“Really? Can I see the nail? And while you’re at it, can you put this drink in a wine glass for me . . . oh, wait, you _can’t_, because your house is _haunted as hell_.” 

“This is not productive.” Lee thinned his lips and crossed his hands in front of him. 

“Didn’t you say you kept having weird dreams, too? What if it’s trying to communicate? C’mon, just try it for a night or two,” Tenten wheedled. “Put it by your bed or something. Your snoring is loud enough you’d probably drown the poor ghost out anyway.”

Lee curled his lip, wavering. “I don’t think this is a good idea.” 

“Just . . . indulge me for once. I even brought you a recorder.” Tenten pulled a small black square from her hoodie pocket and placed it on the table, next to the teddy bear. 

Lee bit his lower lip, cutting his eyes at the thing. It didn’t look difficult to use; there were only three buttons. 

“Please?” Tenten was too proud to beg, but she was not above a little manipulation. She pillowed her chin in her hands and looked up at him, batting her eyelashes. “For your best friend?”

“Neji is also my best friend,” Lee relented, taking the recorder in his hand. 

Tenten punched the air, a victorious grin on her face. 

“I knew you’d do it!” she cheered.

Lee hissed, “Not so loud!”

“Oh, sorry,” she dropped her voice to a whisper, a coy smile on her face. “I forgot the not-a-ghost doesn’t like shouting.”

* * *

That night, Lee set the recorder on his windowsill, between the cactus skeletons and Mr. Teddy, as he had begun thinking of the bear. Outside, a cool autumn wind whipped the treetops into a frenzy, bare branches scraping the upper edges of the sky like long, twisted fingers scrabbling their way out of a grave. 

Lee exhaled hard through his nose. This was going to do nothing but get Tenten’s hopes up. She had always been fascinated with the occult, which had never been a big deal until the paranormal started manifesting under Lee’s own roof. It was as if she had taken Lee’s moving into an old house and just . . . let her mind run away with it. He wondered if he was being a bad friend to play into her wild imaginings. Maybe he really _was_ losing it, to go along with this absurd scheme.

Well, there was no use going back on his word now. He had already promised her he would try, and Lee prided himself on always keeping his promises. He hit ‘record’ before he climbed into bed.

That night, Lee dreamed he was standing at his bathroom sink. He faced the mirror, and through it he saw not his own face, but an empty room he didn’t recognize. On the floor was the broken board of the red step, its paint leaking, staining a heart shape on the wood. A cat’s tail wound through his ankles. On the far side of the room, which was not his own, the door of the dumbwaiter was slamming open and shut, open and shut.

Lee heard muffled crying, a child’s voice. He leaned in closer. As the dumbwaiter door gapped open, he swore he saw a figure. Too large to be a child, but still strangely shrunken, in the way sometimes distant things look small but close. The body was short, thin. An adult, to be sure, but . . . diminished, drawn in on themself. Their shoulders were hunched, knees pulled up, a head of red hair turned away from him so Lee couldn’t see their face. 

“Hello?” Lee called.

The crying grew louder. Lee’s heart ached at the sound. The dumbwaiter door slammed faster and faster.

“Please,” he shouted over the din, “tell me how I can help you!” 

The crying turned to wails. The figure’s head turned slowly. The dumbwaiter door blew wide. 

Gold eyes stared at him from inside.

Lee woke up with a start. It was not quite four in the morning, and the room was still hazy dark. A wickedly cold wind howled through his open bedroom window, buffeting the curtains into spectral shapes. 

On the windowsill, the red light of the recorder blinked. The vase with the cactus stems had been knocked over, and he toed them out of the way as he padded to the window. They rolled away, rattling across the floor like strewn bones. 

He picked up the recorder and pressed ‘play’. 

[agayposter](https://soundcloud.com/user-368696801) · [Saturday, 3:49 AM](https://soundcloud.com/user-368696801/saturday-3-49-am/s-EF1C1)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in getting this chapter out. I think I found a system for writing these a bit faster that makes me want to tear my hair out less. 
> 
> By the way, consider checking out [GaaLee Bingo](https://gaalee-bingo.tumblr.com) and submitting some prompts. Prompt submissions are open until September 30th, and cards will be posted on October 1st.

  


* * *

  


_ “It was true that we were the only ones who could see us. And there was a power in it. It let us live in a space where no one could see what we did. The rules didn’t apply to us. Maybe that freedom was supposed to balance out our invisibility somehow, even.”_

\- Stephen Graham Jones, Raphael

* * *

* * *

  


  


**Gardening Tips and Tricks!**

I’ve been coming home recently to find my back door open.

[](https://i.imgur.com/2psQtBw.jpg)

There’s a neighborhood cat that comes in and out of my house as he pleases. I live in a fairly safe neighborhood, so I often forget to lock the door, and I think he’s taught himself how to open it. I looked up some different videos, and the things that cats can learn to do when they put their minds to it are amazing! Their genius really cannot be underestimated.

Anyway, I thought that might be a sign that today would be a good chance to talk about my gardening efforts!

The only problem is that they’ve really only been _efforts_.

I had grand plans for beautiful landscaping! They were maybe a touch ambitious, since my last few gardening adventures have been . . . less than impressive in their results, as you can see:

[](https://i.imgur.com/ML6ko7Q.jpg)

[](https://i.imgur.com/qDUMr30.jpg)

I couldn’t even keep succulents alive! (The one on the left is a plastic one Neji gave me as a consolation prize when the other two died.)

[](https://i.imgur.com/k6u5Flm.jpg)

That’s fine, though, failures are just a chance to learn! And, boy, have I had a lot of chances to learn about what not to do with plants! I might have something of a brown thumb, honestly, because my yard is in . . . pretty bad shape.

[](https://i.imgur.com/mRT7CEL.png)

The only thing that seems to thrive there is crabgrass and the skinny little trees out back, which I don’t even think are technically on my property.

Well, that and DEAD LEAVES! I know it’s autumn, but they are ridiculous!

And as soon as I rake them up, the very next day . . . 

[](https://i.imgur.com/bX4s6yB.jpg)

At least my compost bin is doing well!

[](https://i.imgur.com/4V0BkKe.jpg)

So, since I don’t have much new to report on the fixer-upper front, I thought I might talk about something a little different.

[](https://i.imgur.com/pmTiqak.jpg)

My friend Tenten has a little hobby of studying spooky things, and she got me some books for a little “light reading”. (Although some of these are actually pretty dense. At least they make good dumbbell substitutes for bicep curls!) I’ve been learning all about the different types of ghosts and hauntings, and I thought today I’d share that knowledge with you. 

(Please keep in mind this is really all imaginary stuff. Ghosts aren’t real, and they can’t hurt you. This is all for fun. Don’t let yourself get too spooked!)

**Residual** hauntings are echoes of a past event. Some people (not me!) believe that if a tragedy occurs in a place, the “energy” of that tragedy can end up sort of infused in that location. It’s like when Papa makes his Super Green Curry and the smell sticks around in the curtains for days! But in the case of a residual haunting, the energy sticks around for years, sometimes even centuries. Residual hauntings are like a song that got stuck on repeat. They play again and again, so people might see specters acting out the event or hear voices from the past, but they can’t really interact with the living world. They often repeat in certain circumstances, like on an anniversary.

**Intelligent** hauntings are your classic ghosts. These are the ones that jump out of cupboards and yell BOO! They’re thought to be dead people who haven’t been able to move on for some reason, so they stick around in a place and try to communicate with the living. They might be able to talk to people or touch them, and they have names and personalities, just like a regular living person. These are the ghosts that have “unfinished business”, and sometimes they need a little help to move on to the next part of life (or, well, death). 

**Poltergeists** are noisy ghosts! They’re the ghosts that throw things and break them and make spooky noises. The interesting thing about poltergeists is that their activity isn’t caused by a dead person, but just the opposite. A living person who’s experiencing emotional distress—normally a teenager—is what causes the poltergeist to appear. Poltergeists normally target one person in particular, like a person the teenager doesn’t like. They can actually be pretty dangerous, apparently! That is, of course, assuming they aren’t just caused by a kid playing pranks. Teenagers are even cleverer than strong-willed cats! I looked into this one a bit more, and one of the websites I found said poltergeists are pretty much always hoaxes. Which is a relief, let me tell you. Now if I only knew any teenagers . . . 

Which brings us to the last type of haunting, **Demonic** hauntings. These are very similar to poltergeist hauntings in the things that happen: objects get broken and people get pushed and scratched and frightened. And the haunting tends to target one person, who often experiences a dramatic personality change. But the big difference is that the origin of the haunting isn’t an upset teenager, but rather an evil entity! Scary! If you have a demonic haunting, you apparently need to get your house blessed and purified, or you might end up hurt . . . or worse, possessed!

* * *

“Well, the good news is I don’t think you have a demon,” Tenten said, looking up from the crystal ball she had sitting in the middle of Lee’s kitchen table. 

“Oh?” Lee perked up and leaned forward. “Did the ball tell you that?” 

Tenten rolled her eyes. “No, the ball told me that you were getting _way too close_ to me. Your eyes look like a fish’s.” 

“Sorry.” 

Lee sat back and fiddled with the plastic cup that held his breakfast wheatgrass smoothie while Tenten took a loud sip from her expensive, whipped cream-laden coffee. She’d been plying him with treats for the past week in order to get him to let her try an increasingly absurd series of arcane rituals to ‘investigate’ his home. So far there had been dowsing rods, swinging crystals on pendula, a ‘talking box’ that spat horrible, grating static, and now the latest: the crystal ball. Lee suspected she’d purchased it at a joke shop. There was a logo on the base of a little clown with a red nose. 

Lee sighed. At least the weather was pleasant enough. It was a cool, crisp autumn morning, the sky outside bright blue. He’d opened the kitchen windows, and a pleasant breeze drifted through them, ruffling the sunflower-print curtains. 

“I feel like it has to be a poltergeist, right?” Tenten had pulled her straw out of her cup and now she was rolling it into the shape of a sticky snail, leaving flecks of spit and sugary coffee on the glass surface of her crystal ball. “It just doesn’t fit with anything else. It’s not like it’s the same shit happening over and over again.”

Lee glanced at his barren cupboards, their plasticware and their paper plates. He’d had to transition his entire spice rack into individual tupperwares last week, after a late-night bout of chaos left his kitchen floor covered in curry powder. Even now the grout between the tile was faintly yellow. 

“Well, okay, the same stuff is happening,” Tenten relented. “But it’s not like a film replaying. It’s just like the ghost has . . . habits or something. Like it reacts certain ways to certain things.”

“There isn’t a ghost,” Lee insisted. 

“If we’re going to keep having the same argument, I can just go.” Tenten leaned across the table and splayed her fingers over the lid of Lee’s cup. “And I can take your five dollar smoothie with me.”

Lee drew back, cradling his cup into the safety of his lap. “No, that’s fine. Please, go on.” 

“So back to my theory. You said it doesn’t try to talk to you, right? Like it’s never whispered in your ear or touched you? Y’know, like—” Tenten wiggled her fingers across the table. “—Ooooh, Leeeee. Help meeee.”

“Nothing like that,” Lee said quickly. 

He hadn’t thought it pertinent to mention his dreams, since they were nothing more than the random firings of his sleeping brain. They had been less worrying of late, anyway. Either they were getting less vivid or he was remembering less of them. He awoke with only the vaguest notions of what he’d dreamt, mere sense memories of his hands wiping tear tracks from a pale face or cold fingers twined with his. 

Nor was it worth discussing the few times he’d thought he felt something brush or pinch him. After all, the house was old and prone to draughts. And the red marks he sometimes woke with on his wrists always faded within a few minutes, nothing more than the reactions of his sensitive skin to the weave of his flannel sheets. They were not so large anymore, anyway. Less like claws had dragged across his skin and more like the lip prints left on a glass. 

But the change in the tenor of the so-called haunting was only further proof that it was Lee’s own mind playing tricks on him. As he’d grown more comfortable with the house, as the house had become more _his_, of course he would find its quirks less unnerving. It was only natural. He and the house were just getting to know each other. 

“And you said you didn’t catch any EVPs?”

“No.” 

As for the recording on the tape, well . . . It had been very windy that night, after his window had blown open. It could have been any sort of animal making that sound, the banging and thumping merely the window being slammed by the wind against its frame. He hadn’t wanted to let Tenten’s imagination run away with her any more than it already had. He’d taken the tape out of the recorder and set it in Mr. Teddy’s lap, next to the vase of cactus stems he’d carefully rearranged. 

He’d made only one further recording, and when he’d played it back he’d heard nothing but his own whuffling snores and a strange, doubled echo of his own breathing.

He hadn’t listened to it since. When Tenten had asked after it, he’d offered to let her listen to eight hours of his snores, knowing she’d decline. 

“Well, the state of your crockery certainly points to a poltergeist.” Tenten gestured to Lee’s draining board, which was stacked with plastic plates and tin cups. “The only thing I can’t reckon is that they’re supposed to be caused by angsty teenagers.”

“Well, there are no teenagers living here.” Lee set his cup decisively on the table, completely missing his coaster. He crossed his arms and sat back. 

“Unless there’s a homeless one in the crawlspace,” Neji chimed in. He was sitting on Lee’s counter, kicking his heels as he slowly drained a cup of some foamy beverage in a sinister green color. He had been so quietly disengaged from Tenten’s theatrics that Lee had almost forgotten he was there.

“I do not have a crawlspace.”

Neji shrugged. “Crawl-dumbwaiter.” 

“Stop that,” Lee snapped. “The dumbwaiter is pest-free. Mr. Aburame gave the whole house a clean bill of critter health.”

“Pest-free, sure, but maybe not _presence_-free.” Tenten hummed and tapped her chin. “I know you’re on the old side—”

“I am in the full Springtime of my Youth,” Lee objected.

“—to be a _poltergeist_,” Tenten clarified, “but maybe it’s you causing all this, Lee. Are you upset about something?” 

“No!” Lee raised his voice.

The lights flickered and dimmed. A stiff breeze whipped through the kitchen, sending Tenten’s ruined straw skittering across the tabletop. 

Tenten arched an eyebrow. 

“Well.” Lee rubbed the back of his neck. “I admit I’m a little upset that you think I’m a ghost haunting my own house!” 

Tenten riffled through the old book she’d set on the table next to her crystal ball, running her finger along the words and mouthing them as she read. 

“No,” she said finally, “I don’t think that’s enough. It has to be, like, really heavy stuff. Traumatic emotions.” She looked up from the page to squint at Lee. “Are you experiencing a deep-seated psychological injury?” 

“I am not!” Lee declared. “I’m perfectly happy!” He grinned his brightest, most convincing grin, and the lights seemed to raise along with the corners of his mouth. 

“Eurgh!” Tenten threw an arm over her eyes. “Enough! Put those things away. You’re blinding me!” 

Neji snorted from his perch on the counter. “The only injury Lee’s experiencing is to his wallet, between the disposable cutlery and the way all the buttons keep ripping off his shirts.” 

“And I’m very thankful to you teaching me how to sew! It is an excellent skill for any independent adult to have,” Lee added. “Actually, that would be an excellent entry for my blog!”

He patted his front shirt pocket for his little notebook—his second brain, he called it—where he kept his shopping lists and words of wisdom from Papa and, nowadays, ideas for future blog posts. The notebook wasn’t there.

“Have either of you seen my—?” 

He stood only to feel a tug at the back of his jeans. 

He reached behind him and found the spiral binding sticking out from his back pocket.

“Never mind!” He pulled it out with a triumphant beam and flipped to the next clean page. “Now, what would you say are your top five tips for darning clothes?” 

“Can we please focus on the reason why I came all the way here?” Tenten whined. 

“Of course.” Lee sat back down and straightened up, setting his notebook down and adopting his sternest face. “You were saying.”

“I was _saying_ I think our next step should be to try to make contact some other way.” Tenten shut the book with a slam and a cloud of dust from its cloth cover. “It’s time to get serious.” 

After his friends had left, Lee swallowed the last dregs of his smoothie and set about tidying the kitchen. 

When he looked down at the kitchen table, rag in hand to wipe it clean, he realized the water ring his cup had left was in the shape of a heart.  


* * *

  


  


* * *

  


* * *

It was really the perfect night for a seance.

At least, it felt that way to Lee, whose knowledge of seances extended only to a few horror movies he’d watched from between his parted fingers and the little factoids Tenten had merrily chirped to him as she’d arranged the Ouija board and candles on his coffee table. 

It was a full moon, and the sky outside was like a velvety blue blanket draped over the earth, sprinkled with sparkling stars. The air was very still both outside and within the house as Tenten dimmed the lights and lit the candles, as if the entire world were waiting with bated breath. 

Neji was sitting the whole ordeal out in the kitchen, its persistent fluorescent light reflecting up the hall rather diminishing the eeriness of the proceedings. Lee could faintly hear him opening and rifling through the freezer. Lee hoped he’d find the Rocky Road ice cream he’d hidden in there. He’d made a special trip to the store and tucked it beneath several bags of frozen broccoli, so Neji could pretend he’d discovered it himself. 

The freezer door slid shut with a muffled thud. There was the rattling sound of a box of plastic spoons. 

Lee grinned. Jackpot.

“What are you so peppy about?” Tenten asked, lighting the final of her candles. 

Lee was quite certain they were not traditional seance candles. The hodgepodge odor of lavender mixed with vanilla, sandalwood, and birthday cake frosting filled the air, drifting from guttering wicks of all different lengths. One of the candles was in the shape of a Jack O’lantern. 

He couldn’t exactly admit he was proud of himself for finding the perfect sugary treat to get Neji to break his diet, so instead he said, “Ah, just excited about first contact, I guess!” 

“First contact?” Tenten scoffed. “Lee, it’s a ghost, not an alien.”

“You don’t know that for sure!” Lee said cheekily. 

Tenten glared at him. He withered under her stare.

“Well, what do you call the first time you speak to a ghost, then?”

Tenten narrowed her eyes. “So you admit there’s a ghost?” 

“I—” 

Lee had grown skilled at turning his head at just the right angle to catch a glimpse of the face in the mirror, the way the texture of the old glass warped in just the right way in response to the shadows of his darkened bathroom. It didn’t look like it was screaming anymore; those hollowed dark-bright eyes just seemed to watch him endlessly, unblinkingly. And the hands he saw now seemed not to claw the other side of the glass, but merely reach for him. Sometimes Lee found himself reaching back, disappointed when his fingers touched only cold and foggy glass.

He still had dreams of the redheaded man, but his nighttime experiences hardly even seemed connected to the . . . energy of the house, the _presence_, or whatever Tenten wanted to call it, that came out as Lee went about his day or when his friends visited, the thing that broke plates and played tricks with the lights. There was no sense of mischief in the man Lee kept seeing in his dreams, only a feeling of aching sadness, of neediness and longing. 

Maybe it wasn’t _a_ ghost. Maybe it was _ghosts_, several of them.

“—I said no such thing,” Lee finally found his voice. 

Tenten exhaled heavily through her nose. “Ever the skeptic.” 

She rolled her eyes and shook out her sleeves. She’d worn one of her mother’s old dressing gowns over her blue jeans, and she had done her hair up with the mother-of-pearl combs Lee had only ever seen her wear to weddings and funerals, like wearing fancy clothes would make the ghost more likely to come out. 

As for Lee, he was just in his track pants and stocking feet. He certainly hoped the—the _whatever-it-was_ wasn’t expecting him in a three piece suit. He wasn’t even sure which of the many upstairs closets he’d stashed his formalwear in, he had occasion to get dressed up so rarely. 

“Okay.” Tenten placed her hand on the planchette. “Let’s do this.” 

Lee rested his fingers delicately on the other side of the little wooden disc, just as Tenten had instructed. It looked more like a guitar pick than a portal to the spirit world. 

Tenten breathed in deep and closed her eyes. “Oh, honored spirits. Please accept the meager feast and libations we offer you as our thanks for joining us on this night.”

It was really just a bowl of trail mix that Neji had picked all the raisins out of and a can of Lee’s diet soda, but Tenten sure knew how to sell it. Lee wondered if he should have opened the can before he set it out. What if the ghost didn’t know how to use a pop top?

“We encase this room in a sphere of white light and ask that only beings that are pure of heart enter our spirit circle on this night.” 

Tenten began moving the planchette in little circles on the board, touching each of the four corners.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to move it,” Lee bent forward to hiss.

Tenten cracked an eye open. “I’m warming it up,” she whispered harshly back. “Now shut up. Only one person is supposed to talk to the spirits at once.” 

She closed her eyes once more and returned the planchette to the center of the board. 

“Now we shall open the session,” she intoned. “Are there any spirits with us on this night?”

Lee stared hard at the planchette, trying to open his mind and channel the ‘spiritual energy’ Tenten kept talking about.

Nothing happened. 

Tenten opened an eye to peek at the board. 

“Are there _any_ spirits with us on this night?” she repeated. 

The planchette remained defiantly still. 

She huffed. 

“The instruction manual said to ask open-ended questions,” Lee suggested. He’d read the little glossy booklet after Tenten had removed the board from its plastic wrappings, which still sat in the small wastepaper basket next to his couch. 

“Oh, now you’re the expert?” Tenten snapped under her breath. “Mr. I-don’t-believe-in-ghosts?” 

Lee put his hands up defensively. “I was only suggesting—!”

“Don’t break the spirit circle!” she hissed. 

Lee slapped his hands back to the planchette so quickly that the candles rocked. 

“Okay,” Tenten said with an undertone of irritation. “Trying this again. _If_ there are any spirits with us on this night, how many of you might there be?” 

They waited, eyes on the planchette, for a very long moment. The room was strangely cold despite the proximity of the candles to Lee’s bare arms. 

The planchette slid slowly towards the numbers at the bottom of the board. 

Tenten gasped. 

“Are you doing that?” she whispered.

“I am not,” Lee replied, just as quietly. 

The planchette stopped on the number one. 

“One spirit?” Tenten asked. 

The planchette glided smoothly this time to the top left corner of the board. 

“Yes,” they both said in the same breath. 

“What sort of spirit are you?” Tenten’s voice was shaky with disbelief. 

They both sounded out the word as the planchette slid along the arc of the alphabet printed on the board. 

“W-H-A-T”

“What? Is it repeating us?” Lee leaned forward again to whisper to Tenten. 

“Sassy little spirit, isn’t it?” Tenten pursed her lips. “Okay, let’s try something different. Where do you come from?” 

The planchette moved once more. Once more, they spelled the word under their breath. 

“H-O-U-S-E”

“House?” Lee’s brows furrowed. “This house? My house?” 

“Did you come from Lee’s house?” 

The planchette slid towards the top of the board. It arced to the left—

“Yes?” Lee guessed

—then to the right—

”No?”

—and settled in the middle. 

“I guess that’s an . . . I don’t know?” Tenten hedged. “Maybe it doesn’t know who you are. Have you ever introduced yourself?”

“To a ghost?” Lee’s face flushed hot in flagrant defiance of all logic. “Of course not.”

“This muscle-bound lunk here is Lee,” Tenten raised her voice. “This is his house that we’re sitting in. He bought it a couple months ago.” 

The planchette trembled, then zagged left. 

“Yes!” they both cried. 

“Yes, you’re from Lee’s house?” Tenten tried to clarify.

The planchette didn’t move. 

“Ask it if it’s a homeless person living in Lee’s crawlspace,” called a disinterested voice from the kitchen.

“Shut _up,_ Neji!” Tenten hollered. “We’re communing with the spirit world!” 

The Jack O’lantern candle flickered and went out with a hiss of smoke.

“Aaand now we’ve pissed it off,” she muttered. “Please ignore Neji, oh spirit. He’s a dumbass.” 

“That’s not very kind to say,” Lee scolded her. “You’re going to give our guest a bad first impression of Neji.” 

“Our _guest_,” Tenten repeated drily.

“I’m only trying to be respectful!” 

Tenten rolled her eyes, redirecting her attention to the board. “Do you like it when Lee’s _respectful_ to you, oh spirit?”

The planchette didn’t move. 

“That’s a yes,” Lee said, feeling a bit smug. Good manners always won out! 

“Or we broke the connection,” Tenten snarked back.

“Do you like the trail mix?” Lee asked, riding the bubbling high of success.

The planchette remained utterly still. 

“Of course it likes trail mix. Everyone likes trail mix. Unless you’re some kind of—” Tenten threw her voice. “—_freak of nature_ who only eats the salty raisins!”

“The raisins are the only healthy part,” Neji’s voice carried into the room, muffled around a spoonful of Rocky Road. 

The vanilla candle’s wick crumpled to ash; smoke curled through the air. 

“Okay, let’s be serious.” Tenten frowned. “Spirit, are you a friendly ghost?” 

The planchette began to vibrate. Lee felt every hair on the back of his neck stand on end. 

Then it slid right.

“No.” Tenten hissed air through her teeth. “You’re not friendly. Are you . . . bad?”

The planchette slid back to the left. It began to rock back and forth beneath their fingers, clattering against the wood. 

“Yes,” Lee whispered. 

“Oh my god!” Tenten’s fingers tensed on the planchette. “Not friendly, a bad spirit. Lee . . .” she muttered. 

“What?”

“I think I was wrong.” She looked up at him, and her deep brown eyes were very wide, candle flames reflected in them. The planchette was jittering hard now; their fingers barely able to keep it in place on the board. 

She shrieked, “Are you a demon?” 

The planchette flew out from beneath their fingers. 

The board went soaring through the air and hit the closet door just as every light and candle extinguished. 

The room was thrown into pitch blackness. 

From the darkened kitchen, Lee heard a muted, “Oh.” 

“Holy shit!” Tenten leapt to her feet so quickly that she upended the coffee table. Trail mix went flying everywhere, little flecks of scattering darkness. The smoke of the deadened candles curled through the air, lit now only by the pale light of the full moon through the crack in the curtains. 

Lee was glad that he hadn’t bothered to open the soda can as its cold form rolled to bump against his toes.

“Lee, did you see that?” Tenten grabbed his arm fiercely. “Did that really just happen?” 

“I . . . I don’t know what I saw,” Lee mumbled. Tenten had been very anxious just now. Any jerky movement could have caused the little piece of plastic to go flying, and of course the electricity in the house had always been questionable at best. 

Which reminded him, Neji was still alone in the darkened kitchen.

“Neji, are you all right?” Lee called. 

“I’m fine.” There was the scraping of a chair being pushed back. “I just can’t see a damn thing.”

Of course. Neji’s eye condition meant he had almost no night vision. 

“We’ll come get you!” He turned to Tenten. “Do you have your cell phone?”

By the light of Tenten’s cell phone flashlight, they made their way to the kitchen. Lee flicked the light switch up and down a few times. Sure enough, it was dead. He tried the lamp over the kitchen sink—also dead—and the vent hood light for good measure—dead as well. Even the lightbulb in the fridge had blown. 

Lee pulled a proper flashlight from his junk drawer and turned it on, sighing. “I’ll just have to wait until the sun comes up to fix them all.” 

“In that case—” Neji groped for Tenten’s arm, squinting in the harsh beam of the flashlight, and finally found it. He saw just as poorly in excessively bright light as he did in the pitch black. “—we should probably be going.”

“Sorry, Lee,” Tenten said sympathetically. “You know how Neji feels about the dark. I can come back tomorrow to try and help you clean up?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Lee cupped his hand over the flashlight’s beam to dim it as Tenten crooked her arm to act as Neji’s sighted guide. “I’ve got plenty of practice replacing light bulbs.”

He stood in the doorway to make sure they made it safely to Tenten’s truck, the light of the full moon bright enough to see fairly well by. His neighbors’ house lights were still on, so it hadn’t been a total blackout. And though the streetlamp just outside his house was darkened, the rest of its ilk up and down the little street glowed pleasant and warm. 

Once his friends had rolled off down the gravel driveway, Lee turned his attention back to the disorderly living room. He stood the flashlight up in between his couch cushions as a makeshift lantern while he set the table back to rights and swept as much of the trail mix as he could find into the trash can. He set the Ouija board and the planchette back on the table for Tenten to retrieve later. 

Then he remembered something she had said earlier. Something about the importance of closing a seance properly, neatly severing the connection to the spirit world so that entities didn’t continue to use the board as a conduit.

In the chaos of the power outage and his friends’ hasty departure, they’d forgotten to close the session. 

Lee sat down on his couch and flicked off the flashlight to save its battery. He remained there for a long moment, staring at the planchette in the center of the board, its glass magnifier glowing in the silvery moonlight like a single blue-green eye. 

He considered lighting the candles again, but then decided against it. The light of the moon was plenty for him to see the dark carved letters on the pale wood of the board. 

He placed his fingertips on the planchette, aware of how they trembled.

“Well,” he murmured, feeling fairly ridiculous, “no matter what you said, I don’t think you’re bad at all. I think you’re just . . . misunderstood.”

His skin prickled, the hair rising along the back of his arms. He felt that sense of being watched like he got sometimes in the shower after a run or when he was getting dressed. It didn’t make him feel uncomfortable, though. Just . . . seen. Appreciated. 

A sense of warmth settled over the tops of his fingers. Like smaller hands cupped over his, very nearly alive. If he held completely still, he swore he could almost hear breathing that was not his own nearby. 

The planchette dragged very slowly to the upper lefthand corner of the board. 

_Yes_

“See?” he whispered to the air. “Not bad at all.” He took a single, shaky breath. “Can I ask you another question?”

The planchette didn’t move from its position. Lee took that as assent.

“What’s your name?”

Everything was terribly still for a long moment, so long that Lee was almost ready to give up and put the board away for good. But he could still feel that strange prickling along the surface of his skin. Something watchful, something waiting. 

Then the planchette shuddered and began to move down and across the alphabet, ever-so-slowly. Its motions were almost hesitant. Cautious. 

_G-A-A-R-A_

“Gaara?” 

A single light flickered on in the upstairs stairwell, right over the hole where the red step used to be.


End file.
